better in consequence. There may be a change in him, let us hope that there may be, but if it comes at all, it will come in some other way. It will not be because we are improving ourselves, because we are getting to be more intelligent, are getting more property, getting on a higher social plane, getting to be more virtuous, more self-respecting. That kind of thing has little or no influence in favorably inclining the average white man towards the Negro. It makes no difference what he has, what he has achieved, what he has made of himself, he is still only a Negro, is still undesirable, is still to be hedged about by limitations and restrictions.

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Senator Vardaman in his "high-blown pride" speaks of the white race as "the greatest race on the globe." If the Senator is a specimen of its greatness, the so-called inferior races need not concern themselves very much about catching up with it in the march of progress. As a matter of fact, there are scores of colored men who, in intelligence, in brain power, in scholarship, in all the elements that go to make up true manhood, are superior to Mr. Vardaman. The only respect in which the Senator shows any superiority, in the sense of surpassing others, so far as I can see, is in the exhibition of a coarse, vulgar, and brutal spirit. The white race may be the greatest race on the globe, but the assertion of that fact would come with a little better grace from one who reflects its greatness rather than from one who is a reproach to it, who discredits it. The white people themselves would hardly select Mr. Vardaman as a specimen by which it would care to be judged in this or in future generations. The Negro may be inferior, greatly inferior to the white race, but there would have to be some better specimen of the white race than Mr. Vardaman to prove it. My purpose, however, is not to criticise the honorable 17Senator from Mississippi. I have mentioned his name in this connection merely as illustrative of the aggressive, ever-growing spirit of race hatred, of race antagonism, which still confronts us after fifty years of freedom.

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(10). In this connection we ought to impress ourselves also, as we leave the first half century of freedom and enter upon the second half, with the fact that God is and that he is a present help in time of need. We need to emphasize, more strongly than we are in the habit of doing, the importance of religion as a factor in this race struggle in which we are engaged. In Exodus 14, we are told that after Pharaoh had given the children of Israel permission to leave Egypt, and after they had left, he 

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